


Crocus

by Petronia



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: M/M, post-The Privilege of the Sword
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 01:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/460956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now Richard wondered if that first exile had not been cowardice, after all. It had seemed self-evident at the time that he would not have been enough. That <i>this</i> would not have been enough.</p>
<p>And now...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crocus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [canis_m](https://archiveofourown.org/users/canis_m/gifts).



At first Richard spoke nothing of the language, but he picked up the essentials quickly, with minimal effort. Alec spoke a version of it haltingly – haughtily – the grammar archaic or (Richard suspected) incongruously flowery; it made the charwomen gape, and impeded rather than facilitated communication.

“The ancients,” said Alec, when this last was put to him, “hardly made soiled linen the business of poetry,” and refused outright to make an effort, as if the offense were the islanders’ latter-day linguistic decadence. Richard found this obscurely reassuring. It meant he had to take the running of the household in hand, and some part of him had always preferred to have Alec in his keeping. 

They went on long walks together, and separately. Sometimes they did not see each other from dawn to dusk. Alec would not dictate limits to him, as a point of honour, and Richard loved him for it. He explored the slopes and crags of the shoreline, listening for the inbound tide – night or day, it mattered little now – learning its rhythm until it was as familiar as that of sleep. On other, leisurely treks into the hills Alec held his arm, and told him what he saw.

(Heather and red sage, mostly; other grasses Alec could not name but Richard could remember by scent, and small knotted trees.

“Tall groves of cedar and pine, the poets claimed – filled with birdsong and the incessant babble of brooks. They must have felled them all for ship’s masts; if I were a goatherd, I’d count myself lucky to meet the shade of a stunted acacia bush every half-mile.”

They were lying, supine, under such a one; or so Alec had said. It was afternoon, and they were warm still from exertion, but the earth was cool. Alec’s arm was thrown carelessly over Richard’s, fingers curved loosely against the side of his tunic. Richard gazed upward, unseeing. The blur of lowering daylight was dappled with something that he imagined to be leaf-shade.

Elsewhere, despite Alec’s words, the island was forested and fertile. The image was in Richard’s mind, as if he had been the one to perceive and engrave it in memory: an undifferentiated mass at first, mountainous, shadow-green and cloud-wreathed. Then, on a dip and rise of the bow, red cliffs rising from the waves. 

As the ship had tacked closer the great rock faces had loomed overhead, cragged and variegated, blocking out the sky. A collision course, but – miraculous reversal! – at the seeming instant of disaster the way had opened to them, like a secret. A long glittering inlet, and they had seen the port: no greater than a village, a toy-block spill of houses down the hillside, with a skirt of surf-foam blooming white at its feet. Here and there a glimpse of ochre sand, like a discarded ribbon half-submerged in blue.

He had extrapolated from a few words, a wheeling cacophony of seabirds, and the taste of land on his tongue. That last had not left him; a shadow of it lingered still.

“Look for hives in the bark,” he said. “There’ll be honey in summer.”)

He kept in practice. He could not be what he once was, but that battle had been lost so long ago as to have become itself memory. What remained was an entirely utilitarian discipline. They were known as strangers; their refuge was of no particular account, but he could not assume it free of piracy or banditry. 

Alec had given up much of what he had been, in order to come away with Richard, but it would not have occurred to him to ask the same in return. This was not self-abnegation. Alec had always been drawn to the killer in Richard, as Richard had not cared for the poisoned and poisonous nobleman – except insofar as that, too, was his lover in essence, and not a lesser self to be sloughed off with cloying sentiment. Richard had recognized it, or he might have demanded more, and earlier.

Pride had exiled him from the City, once, more so than prudence. They had both changed, and he had retained nothing of worth to Alec – that was how Richard had framed the matter. (He’d thought of himself as calm, too, accepting of inevitability, but that was a recurring weakness. He rarely knew he was perturbed until the crisis, internal or external, had already passed.) It had been his own point of honour not to force the issue, though that – perhaps – had been what Alec had wanted. For the decision to be out of his hands, rages and machinations inconsequential. As it now finally was.

Alec would not admit regret, any more than he assigned blame. Only on occasion, on nights when he came to Richard, the thought of it seized him with a fresh madness to categorize: feverish whispering of time lost to false endings, and distance abolished except in memory...

Now Richard wondered if that first exile had not been cowardice, after all. It had seemed self-evident at the time that he would not have been enough. That _this_ would not have been enough.

And now...

 

* * *

 

On the cusp of the third month Alec appeared, a wavering presence darkening the porch door, and said: “The women are picking crocuses.”

They went in the grey hour before dawn, because that was when the flowers opened. Alec, who had not bothered to go to bed, described the scene in a murmur, leaning on Richard’s shoulder as he would never have in the City, so that he made one long line of warmth against Richard’s side. The cracked soil, improbably veiled with a fuzz of violet; the bent backs of the women and girls; what Richard could hear of their groans and laughter, and the crackling of torches as they came and went. Each flower out of hundreds – thousands – had to be coaxed by hand, papery petals yielding up threads of red-gold treasure, to be plucked, spread out on baskets, and dried. The air was metallic with the effluvia of saffron.

The village held a festival, some days later, once that curiously fleeting spring harvest had drawn to an end, and they attended that as well. Alec chose to wander, while Richard sat by the bonfire and was offered meat and small cakes, and well-cooled wine flavoured with resin. There was singing by the young women, followed by men. Someone struck up an interminable melopee, girded by handclaps; the shadows of dancers moved like wraiths across his field of vision. They might have been scrawled figures – an ancient, recessive memory – on the walls of an underground cave, licked by dimly reflected flames.

“I know this song,” Alec observed, returning. Richard turned to him.

“Do you?”

“It’s very old.” Alec did not elaborate. He had read it in a book of poetry, Richard supposed.

“Have you tried this one?” he said. “It has saffron and dried quince in.”

Alec took the cake. His fingers, brushing against Richard’s, were cool, as if he’d been handling metal left out in the dew. There was perhaps a foot’s worth of distance between them, but across it Richard felt an unnamed tension peak in Alec and begin to drain away, slowly, like water gathered behind a dam.

“This is good,” Alec said, observationally. He might have meant the cake. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Richard said. Alec shifted, swaying fractionally closer, then away.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

They went home. Alec did not speak, or take Richard’s arm, but the path was by now familiar. At the top of the porch steps Alec touched Richard's sleeve, and drew him in.

" _Come here,_ " he said, low. Then, in their own native tongue, "Come to me."

Richard went. Alec let his head fall back, against the uneven stucco; his hair was coming loose from its bindings, a warm, familiar weight in Richard's hands. He murmured something else Richard half-recognized, but could not fully parse. The words of the song?

"A flower," he said, inflecting it as a question into the dip of Alec's throat. Alec’s breath stuttered, not quite laughter.

"Come to me," he said, "I am a broken-stemmed flower in your passage, still-fragrant in crushed grass. _Come back to me, love. Now my sweet is leavened with bitter, and my bitter shot through with sweet. I tremble, I am feverish, come here, come now, to me..._ "

 

* * *

 

What lay between them would not change. Richard had lived in certain expectation of their parting; had tired of foresight and engineered it. But he had known – even before Tremontaine had exacted the return of its heir – that he would take no other lover after Alec.

He had had his share of dalliances, once. Pleasures lightly offered and taken, and more tenacious attachments that had ended in indifference or pain. Jessamyn, too, his great, careless disaster, whose loss had revealed the dizzying lacuna in his self where guilt ought to reside... Desire had been no constant through it all. It would rise and fall like a flame, that he might choose to feed or bank or starve to ashes; or a sweet, winding phrase of music, that obeyed no logic he could parse and yet, after an arbitrary interval of time, would come to a silent rest. 

He could not – had never – marked time with Alec. His proximity brought Richard’s every sense to readiness: the familiar, infinite present where death drew close and bent to the swordsman’s will. And so it came to be that time could not touch Richard’s desire for him.

_I hadn’t known it could be like this,_ Alec had said, once. 

He was dangerous still, here, kneeling close on the bed so that their breaths mingled, his narrow waist framed in Richard’s remembering hands.

“The crocuses made me think of you,” he said. “They were the colour of your eyes. It was novel, to be reminded of you and remember – ah, yes – I’d left you practicing, and there I would find you again. I used to forget... where you were... for minutes at a time. Do you remember I brought you bluebells once?”

His voice was light and careless, pitched to deliver nonsense; his fingers were feverish-urgent on the laces of Richard’s collar. Richard made a toneless hum of assent, and allowed the shirt to be tugged up and off.

“A big muddy bunch of them, roots and all,” he said. “You finished Marie’s perry and used the jar as a vase. I remember.”

“Oh, dear Marie. Now _there_ was a poetics, if you recollect, a grammar and rhetoric of soiled linen... add in the scullery maid and one had oneself a cosmogony.”

This was true nonsense, which Richard liked better. He shifted them both to press Alec back against the pillows, with a flare of nostalgia for the ragged, over-large scholar’s robes whose unfastening he had memorized. Wished, too, that he could see Alec’s eyes: they had been – were still, he imagined – such a lovely green, and in this illumination would take on an inky depth, as if their bedroom lamplight were cast, shimmering and discontinuous, on the waves of a dark sea...

As well gaze into the sea, now. The thought carried little sting, but he knew better than to voice it.

“Richard,” Alec whispered. His hand brushed against Richard’s side and travelled downward, following the crease of his hip, seeking. 

“I’m here,” Richard said. The words did not greatly matter. Alec moved under him, sinuous, and they touched – melded together, it seemed to Richard, in one long, heated, maddening slide of bare skin. He felt Alec turn his face aside, so that his sigh came hot against the crook of Richard’s arm.

The last lover, the homecoming, the guard-less blade. 

The last and the best.

 

* * *

 

“You could kill me now,” Alec said afterward, sleepily, “and I would hardly feel it.”

Richard had learned to accept this as a compliment, at least when the tone was not overly serious. “I’d have to get up.”

“Mm, there is that.” Alec trailed a languid fingertip over Richard’s collarbone and down his arm, the touch possessive and a little ticklish. “I could keep a knife under the pillow.”

“You’d cause an accident first.”

“You’re right. ...You’re always right: I should’ve let you teach me how to do it properly. When it came down to it, I had to scrabble for the nearest blunt object. The scene was deplorable.”

Discretion was the better part of valour. Richard closed his eyes, seeking a less fraught darkness, and ran his hand idly through Alec’s hair. The shutters were imperfectly closed, and let in the murmur of the outbound tide; but the night was mild, and he did not wish to disturb the tangle of Alec’s limbs against and around his own. 

“It would have to be a knife,” Alec said. “Knives... Sharp, not difficult to lift or grasp, and some rudimentary study of anatomy. I wonder...” He trailed off, and Richard nearly thought him asleep, but after a minute he stirred again, a long soft exhalation. “Too late, do you think?”

Distance abolished except in memory.

“Never,” Richard said.


End file.
